Would increasing high-skilled immigration really benefit the country (US)?Yuval Levin and Reihan Salam's outline of a possible compromise approach to immigration has much to recommend it. But they share a bind spot with many conservative immigration skeptics: support for increases in skilled immigration. To be sure, they do not call for an increase in overall immigration, but seek to make up for more narrowly defined family-based admissions with increases in skills-based ones so as to keep the level of immigration roughly where it is now. There are a number of problems with this.
First, consider the politics. Policy aside, Levin and Salam present their compromise vision as a "plausible resolution" of the quandary we're in, a "constructive alternative" that offers something to both cosmopolitans and populists. In other words, they're describing what they hope might become a politically viable package, as well as one that serves the national interest.
Making any broad changes to immigration is politically difficult, as everyone can see, but an approach that increases skilled immigration at the expense of family admissions would be uniquely inflammatory because of its clear ethnic overtones. It's likely Levin and Salam haven't even thought about it in these terms, but what they're proposing is essentially an end to Latin American immigration and its replacement with increased flows from Asia. Many other conservatives, though, who share the goal of reorienting immigration toward skilled workers are explicit in their preference for Chinese and Indians over Mexicans and Hondurans.
Their proposal is certainly not invalidated by this inevitable result; "disparate impact" is an obsession best left to the Left. But it does make it considerably less viable than broad reductions in all categories. This "skilled good/unskilled bad" approach would be — already is — presented as an attack on Hispanics. Combine that with Levin and Salam's idea of a non-citizenship amnesty, where former illegal aliens (overwhelmingly Hispanic) would remain a sort of helot class, albeit a legalized one, and you have a recipe for an even more polarized and inflammatory debate than we have already.
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http://www.cis.org/OpedsandArticles/skilled-immigration-not-all-its-cracked-up-to-be
